Dev talk~ Intro

Yes, this is a dev blog. You should've expected articles/posts about game development from me by now. I'll be talking/ranting about intros in games in this post. More specifically, the design choices behind the intro of Captivity.

But a few things to talk about first. I'm still updating the dialogue of the house scene. (Bolded and underlined for the impatient.) It's a very meticulous and repetitive process. So it's still taking awhile for me to fully update it. Two, I'm looking for help! Specifically a programmer proficient in JavaScript with the know-how of coding UI elements. While I can't compensate anyone yet, I'd love to have a talk about commissioning your help with coding UI elements with Captivity. Either drop me an email at x3Darkie@gmail.com or send me a pm on LoK if you're interested. Finally, I'll be resuming monthly charging on Patreon at the beginning of September. I thought about it for a bit, and I thought, the whole point of running a Patreon campaign is for people to support me financially if they like what I'm doing. I've also been feeling more productive for the past month or so. It's alright if you're an existing patron and want to remove your pledge. So just a heads up, if you wish to continue your support, please do so, if you don't, please remove your pledge.


Now, let's talk intros! Intros are what introduces us to the universe of whatever we're playing, reading or watching. It's an integral part of narrative. And for a video game, an intro can also serve as a tutorial of the game mechanics. There are multiple ways of doing intros. Naturally, some are better than others in context. A common way of creating an intro is in medias res, or "into the middle of things." As the name implies, the narrative starts off in the middle of something, and everything (the motive, exposition, past events) the audience needs to know is commonly conveyed through dialogue and/or flashbacks. A good example is Final Fantasy 7. After the FMV opening, the game puts the player in the middle of an assault by an unknown group with no exposition whatsoever to keep the player wondering, then they're shortly prompted to a tutorial-esque fight. This gives the player a taste of the game's combat system and keeps them interested. When the player proceed to the next area, they'll finally be treated to some tasty exposition and the names of the characters. On a side note, if I had to nitpick something, it's the forth wall breaking tutorial message. It breaks immersion. Barret shouldn't have to tell me to press X. Let a popup window do that.

While Captivity's intro isn't that much different, aside from the lack of combat at the beginning (I'll tell you why in a bit), I came across a couple challenges and had to make a few compromise in order to make the intro "work." First, the lack of a tutorial combat during the intro. While I'd love to put the player directly into a combat scenario at the start, I can't do that as I don't know the Player's class. Each class have a different weapon, and I can't just make the Player have a default "preferred" weapon. And so to compromise, I had to make the player start out without a class and without a tutorial combat.

The other problem is the lengthy intro. There's only so many way to do in medias res and include a h-scene in the intro. One of the reasons I didn't want to start the game chronologically is because that'll only increase the length further. And I don't want to give the player the option to "create" a character only to be genderbended into a busty white haired woman later in the intro. Imagine creating your character in Skyrim and Alduin didn't appear and you got your head chopped off and died just to play as the default canon character or the game have you create a new character? That'd be pretty funny and trollish. The other reason is that it'll break the immersion and narrative slightly. The main menu of the game? You click New Game and bam, you're in the game. You're in Captivity. That's the narrative and gimmick of the game. The only "real life" segment is the flashback scene in abandon house. And I doubt there's going to be any more flashbacks aside from that one scene.

I've pretty much only talked about the challenges I've faced creating the intro, so let's change it up and talk about the good parts! Like I mentioned, an intro also serves as a tutorial to the game mechanics. After the lengthy dialogue at the start, you get to roam around, you get to save and you also get to talk to Kyle and Kerry. Talking to Kerry for the second time gives you a slightly different dialogue. This tells you that dialogue changes the second time. Nothing new here, a lot of games does this. I also included 2 h-scenes in the intro, each with two choices for the player. This lets the player know two things. First, if it isn't made clear enough, there's going to be porn in the game. Second, the notification after selecting one of the choices tells the player there's an inhibition meter in the game. And naturally, choosing the "perverted" or "uninhibited" actions lowers your inhibition. Which when low enough, you can do more and more depraved scenes later in the game. And you might also notice there's no penetration scenes in either of them. Like normal porn, it doesn't start with the humping, it starts with foreplay. And that's what it is. It's to keep you invested in the game and makes you want to play more to get to the good part.

And here ends my talk about intros! It actually turned into more of a rant at the end instead. I just wrote whatever was on my mind. I put no thought into creating a cohesive article. I'm too lazy for that. But bye! I'll see you in pre-build 4.3!

Why RPG Maker MV?

Alright, I'll admit. I don't have much done for the past few days. Designing clothing for characters is certainly not easy. I had to draw, erase, draw and then erase and rinse and repeat for a couple more times before I'm kinda satisfied with it. As a result, I feel rather burned out. Note: I have no intention to abandon this project. Work is just coming slowly. So since I haven't made a new post for a few days, I might as well make one now and talk about why I'm using MV instead of VX or VX Ace. This might not interest the average person at all, but if you're an aspiring creator that's still bouncing back and forth between choosing VX/Ace or MV, this post might interest you. Also, I'll be ranting in italics like this one.


In hentai games like these, it all basically comes down to resolution size. MV games by default is in 816 x 624 while VX Ace is in 544×416. In most hentai games that portrays sex visually (A.K.A CGs. I'm just trying to sound smarter than I actually am.) like these, having a high resolution is highly recommended if not needed. I'm not talking about retro, pixel or purposefully pixelated artworks. Those have their own place and not the point I'm trying to get across. Now if you've played Despair Labyrinth before, you'd realize that it has some rather pixelated CGs. Though that might be because of the rendering, I'm not sure. While compared to Captivity, the CGs are crisp and clean looking. But if you play in a maximized window or fullscreen it's still going to look somewhat pixelated. And while I could very well bump the resolution up to 720p or even 1080p if I wanted to (this is something you can do easily with MV), doing so brings a whole slew of its own problem. Mostly regarding to map size, tiles and problems within the creator itself. And I can't be assed to circumvent the problems that shouldn't have been there to begin with.

The second thing would probably the increase count of more items, weapons, and variables and stuff. IIRC, everything that has a count of 999 in the previous RPG Makers have been increased up to 2000. That's twice as much. While I'm probably never going to use all of it, it does provide more leeway. But why did they impose an arbitrary limit of 2000 instead of just making it 9999 regardless of whether or not people will actually use them all in this day and age is beyond me.

Finally, the switch from Ruby/RGSS3 to JavaScript. Now I'm personally not a programmer so this doesn't affect me much. But if you're well versed in the arcane arts of computer magic, this is something you might want to look out for.

There's also a couple more changes to MV, but that's basically the gist of it. Now then, time to frustrate myself more with clothing designs.